Posted
by
timothyon Tuesday June 15, 2010 @02:03PM
from the when-hitler-came-up-with-scientology dept.

netbuzz writes "In an effort to encourage greater participation, Wikipedia, the self-described 'online encyclopedia that anyone can edit,' is turning to tighter editorial control as a substitute for simply 'locking' those entries that frequently attract mischief makers and ideologues. The new system, which will apply to a maximum of 2,000 most-vulnerable pages, is sure to create controversies of its own."

(I try to volunteer a bit of my time on Huggle, a.NET application that allows for Wikipedia users with rollback permission to quickly patrol, revert vandalism, warn, and report users)

Vandalism has been down a lot from what I've seen in the past, and more and more I get beaten to the punch reverting it.

The biggest problem I see with this "pending changes" is that there will be so many edits that intentional subtle trolling (deliberately inserting incorrect facts/statistics) is more likely to get through just by the nature of the fact that experienced editors will have to read thousands of edits.

However, it does make Wikipedia more accessible to a wider variety of users and should stop scaring away new contributors. Most anonymously made edits are actually not vandalism, so it's good to see Wikipedia trying to take an approach that allows these people to contribute to "bigger" (in the sense of # of visitors) articles.

Everybody knows part of the problem with Wikipedia is the automated tools, that and the insane edit counts required by people who play it as a game with the idea of "leveling up" to admin.

Try to correct a date, for example, and watch it get reverted just so someone can add another reversion to their edit count. Lather, rinse, repeat. Good data is 99% likely to be reverted at this point, because the people operating "tools" like Huggle, Twinkle, Finkle, Fuckle, Whatever don't give two shits about checking to

The biggest problem I see with this "pending changes" is that there will be so many edits that intentional subtle trolling (deliberately inserting incorrect facts/statistics) is more likely to get through just by the nature of the fact that experienced editors will have to read thousands of edits.

I wouldn't agree with this - for the main reason that (AFAIK) anti-vandalism currently relies a lot on automated processes that check for common vandalism patterns. This change will bring the changes under the scru

This is supposed to open up participation by anonymous and new editors so that they can work on a small number of highly controversial articles. It might work, for those articles. But there is a broader problem that it won't address, which is that when a newbie edits *any* article on WP, they are extremely likely to get slapped in the face by having their edits immediately reverted without any explanation. I started working on WP articles in 2002, did a lot of editing until 2006, and finally gave up and munged the password to my account so I wouldn't be tempted to get heavily into it again. Somewhere between 2002 and 2006, the whole experience changed. These days, WP belongs to people who keep watch-lists of articles that they want to defend. The type of person who is successful at this game is totally obsessed with making sure that a particular paragraph in the article on shoe polish remains the way it is. Since I only edit anonymously now, I see the same experience as a newbie, and it ain't pretty. If you add a citation to a source, people will revert you because they assume the link is spam. If you clean up redundant text in an article, people revert you because they were in love with the sentence they wrote, and want it to stay in the article. Recently I added a couple of sentences to a WWII-era biographical article in which I referred to the Nazi party, and someone's bot reverted it because "Nazi" was a keyword that it was programmed to assume indicated vandalism.

I can totally understand how people would defend their paragraphs. In that case, the system should allow others to attack. A really CMS should be able to list multiple versions of the same issue, along with some background information about the authors. In other words, just let the world decide who's the genius and who's the moron.

I generally had a very positive experience with editing WIkipedia. Your examples indicate that there is a lot of bullshit going on behind the scenes, but still, we need this friction, because without it it would be little better than uncyclopedia. If I wanted to edit articles in the earnest, I would definitely create an account, I would write intelligible comments explaining my edits, and I would start asking to lock articles with dumb-skull bots guarding them, and get my way after a proper bureaucratic process. The end result is a better article, so it is totally worth the effort.

Recently I added a couple of sentences to a WWII-era biographical article in which I referred to the Nazi party, and someone's bot reverted it because "Nazi" was a keyword that it was programmed to assume indicated vandalism.

If you clean up redundant text in an article, people revert you because they were in love with the sentence they wrote, and want it to stay in the article.

Your example perfectly illustrates one of the biggest problems. You say the text you modifed is "redundant". You are you? What makes you right and them wrong? Maybe the text was fine as written and you lack the intelligence to appreciate it. Or maybe the original author was an idiot who has no ability to write coherently. Who decides which one is c

My exact same experience. I uploaded over 100 images (many of which kept getting deleted), had over 8000 edits, and finally just gave up as the WikiNazis just sucked all the enjoyment out of it. It went from being a way to share my experience and willingness to research, into a drudgery that forced me to have to constantly argue with Admins who had more interest in inflating their numbers than creating a set of balanced articles.

Once in a while, I will remove a comma, correct a spelling, or do something m

Even leaving aside the obvious entries on religion, abortion, evolution, etc... We also have to deal with viral marketing firms who, for example, kept editing the entry for the faux-dokumentary "The Fourth Kind" trying to make it seem real.

There are simply more people willing to discredit Wikipedia, not just the small percentage of the population who indulge in trolling behaviour for shits and giggles.

The funny thing is that I think a lot of the shits and giggles type vandalism is done by (otherwise) productive editors of the Wikipedia. I've done a bit, practical joking sometimes, and I generally check that my vandalism didn't stick (it never does).

Wikipedia is facing marketeers and anti-wikipedia ideologues now, and they want their edits to stick. So the problem is harder.

That said, I think the problem of vandalism is overblown, and the reaction too strong in many cases. I've seen articles on my watchl

How does this change affect any of this? Previously, when a new/anonymous user wanted to change something in a semi-protected article, they had to suggest the changes on the talk page and get an "approved" user to do them. Now, anyone can make changes to the page in a way that's not visible to Wikipedia visitors, and they can be approved by experienced editors. It's the same thing, except now it requires less work on both sides.

Everybody knows Wikipedia is often very helpful, but occasionally can't be trusted. The problem is, Wikipedia doesn't seem to give feedback about *when* vandalism, non-neutrality, and other problems are likely. Of course it can happen anywhere, but for some pages, vandalism is an epidemic.

How about if the Wikipedia engine automatically identified pages with very high rates of reverted page edits, "vandalism" and other similar terms appearing in the history, rapidly growing Talk:: sections, and other signs of trouble, and came right out and said in a top-of-page banner: this page is rapidly changing, and may be unreliable.

This can be done mechanically, without having possibly biased editors to flag or protect pages, or to approve or disapprove changes. As a reader, if I know that the page I'm reading has been modified 20 times in the past week, with edits affecting 50% of the total text, most of which were reverted, I can form my own conclusion about its current reliability.

One can only make an honest attempt. For most topics, it should be possible to find an impartial editor. There may be some fringe topics where an impartial POV is impossible, but those topics aren't terribly important in the grand scheme of things.

For some topics, it's difficult to find an impartial-but-competent editor. Take politics: if the editor understands the topic, they will very likely have a personal position on it. If they don't understand it, they probably won't be able to figure out what's worth including, and how much coverage to give different points of view. (Articles that simply list every possible point of view -- like "Some people believe this; other people believe that..." -- are rather useless.) At some point, someone needs to make a judgement over which points of view are fringe and which are mainstream, if only to convey that to their readers, and that is a judgement that someone will always contest.

Articles that simply list every possible point of view -- like "Some people believe this; other people believe that..." -- are rather useless.

Agreed that listing every possible point of view (including nut case ones) in detail is not very useful. However, listing main points of view and giving the primary arguments for each is quite useful.

Picking the first hot topic that came to mind led me to the Wikipedia article on gun politics in the USA [wikipedia.org]. While this article has a lot of warnings (including neutrality) at the head of it, it seems like a fairly balanced coverage. Nuts on either side won't like it, but I think knowledgeable and open minded people, even those who lean strongly one way or the other, will find it tolerably neutral.

People who can do this exist for most topics or, at a minimum, a couple people who are open minded and knowledgeable but are on opposite 'sides' of the issue exist and could work together to make the judgment.

The problem is, most of these people have real jobs (often in academia or in think tanks) and probably unlikely to spend their time on Wikipedia when they could be publishing their insight and research either for creds or for money. They are also likely to be unwilling to spend the necessary time to defend their contributions from editing by people who know little about the topic or are unable to accept that any position but their own could be useful.

I'm not convinced that you need someone who doesn't have a personal position on a topic. It's true that some people have a problem putting their bias aside to write an impartial article, but this is not true of everyone. The people most likely to abuse that situation by suppressing the opposing view, are the ones who fear the opposing view because when you get right down to it they aren't so secure in their own view.

I'm also not convinced that you need an expert on a topic to evaluate which perspectives are worthy of inclusion. An encyclopeida is a secondary source; you always have to know who's claiming this-or-that before you can include it. So all you need is someone who can rate the significance of the source. Do I have to be an expert on American politics to know that the official Republican and Democratic positions on an issue are more significant than a view that I can only find cited by Bob at the corner bar? Not really.

Wikipedia's approach isn't even close to an "honest attempt", however. The methods by which their administrator clique treats outsiders are ridiculously jackbooted; organized groups have been able to get a few admins in place [livejournal.com] and then simply use them to run roughshod over anyone who comes in in good faith to try to repair the damage done by partisans taking over articles.

There was a kerfluffle a few years ago when an organized Arab group went nuts trying to remove the Hebrew translations of certain regional

as in every system, power to influence people attracted people with an agenda, and organized people always beat honest disorganized individuals. that is, in the end, the fate of every system, to became a bureaucratic dictatorship (or oligarchy if it makes you feel better)

Before someone pulls a [citation needed] on you, this can be largely corroborated by wading through Encyclopedia Dramatica. Granted, you'll be exposed to a vast amount of shock porn, racism, homophobia and petty bickering along the way, but for a site devoted to trolling and memes it is often astonishingly (and brutally) factual.

Before someone pulls a [citation needed] on you, this can be largely corroborated by wading through Encyclopedia Dramatica. Granted, you'll be exposed to a vast amount of shock porn, racism, homophobia and petty bickering along the way, but for a site devoted to trolling and memes it is often astonishingly (and brutally) factual.

ED is one of the funniest sites on the internet. If you think your seeing racism and homophobia there anymore than exists in any group of people, you are woefully out of touch with reality.

Neutral is identifying the men (or newspapers or whatever) who are stating the "facts", and stating that they are stating those facts, without stating that they're right. (The fight then becomes "whose opinions do we bother to list here, and whose are irrelevant?" and that's usually quite a bit less controversial. not controversy-free, but less controversial.)

The Taleban put a 7 year old to death for spying. That's as neutral and baldly factual as it gets. Neither of your statements are correct, they are emotion-filled words meant to evoke a response and not state facts.

Qari Yousef Ahmaid, the Taleban spokesman, denied that any of his militants were involved. "The Taleban's enemies are the Afghan Government and the foreign forces," he said. "We never kill children. Everyone knows a seven-year-old can't be a spy."

However, I found it ironically illustrative of the fact that when someone claims something is “as neutral and baldly factual as it gets”, even if they’re honestly trying to make it neutral there’s still a very good chance that it isn’t. PitaBred still fell into a logical fallacy with making what he thought was a purely factual statement.

Nobody said convicted of. Being “convicted of” something means a court decided you were guilty, and as courts have been known to make mistakes it is possible (though usually not likely) that being convicted of something does not mean that you were guilty of it.

We are talking about someone being put to death for something. Why was he put to death? Because he was a spy.... well, allegedly a spy. However the literal reading of the sentence, “The Taliban put a 7 year old to death for spying

If an innocent person is executed for spying, he's still been executed for spying.

That is where we disagree. He has been executed, but we don’t know why: if he was innocent, it wasn’t for spying.

What was he executed for? Was he or wasn’t he a spy?

If he was a spy, then yes, he was executed for spying. Cue the discussion about whether or not it is appropriate to carry out capital punishment on 7-year-olds for actual crimes they’ve committed, which is an entirely valid topic for discussion but not suitable for the encyclopedia.

It doesn't seem to me that a conviction establishes the ultimate truth of guilt or innocence, but rather states a point of view. Saying that the Taliban convicted someone of spying doesn't, in my mind, determine whether or not that person actually did such a thing. Just that they convicted him of it. In an ideal world a conviction would always match a true determination of guilt, but as we've seen in America it's perfectly possible to convict and execute an innocent man.

More recently, "to beg the question" has been used as a synonym for "to raise the question": for example, "This year's budget deficit is half a trillion dollars. This begs the question, How are we ever going to balance the budget?"
Using the term in this way, although common, is considered incorrect by some usage commentators.

is an example of the begging the question fallacy (I won’t link to it on Wikipedia; Anonymous Coward already did). In order for that sentence to be true, the fact that he was spying would have to be accepted. If he was not spying, I contest that the previous statement was false, and the opposite claim “The Taliban put a 7-year-old to death on a false accusation of spying” would be true. However, either one of those statements is a judgment, not a fact.

Maybe he was, but in the U.S., we don't recognize that a 7yo can understand what they're doing while committing a crime to a level where the appropriate punishment is death. The death penalty is reserved for adults (or exceptionally rare teens), and hasn't been a community event since hangings.

Ahh, the smell of fresh Grammar Nazi bait...Every instance of "begging the question" on Slashdot should automatically be modded +5 Funny, since it pulls out the strangest people, debating about the most pointless things that nobody outside a debate club cares about. It's the best meme on this site.

LOL. You got to be kidding! Neutral according to your world view, and that of your environment.Another view is how the Taliban might describe it. Either the Muslim Taliban or the Christan Taliban (“teabaggers”)The point here is, that everyone of you considers himself the only who is globally one right. And everyone of you has all his “knowledge” and “facts” from what he considers trustworthy and unbiased sources, while to everyone of you, the others are complete nutcases.

An NPOV position which should make the truth clear enough could go something like "The Taliban executed him, stating that he was a spy; this has been decried as bloody murder by (identification of some groups doing the decrying, with citation)."

See? Not hard. Perhaps it's not as good at galvanizing people into righteous outrage as the phrase "brutally murdered" but that's just the price you pay sometimes. It's an encyclopedia. I don't think Britannica would use language quite so loaded either, you know?

What makes you think you have to choose one of those two? Or, to put it differently, what part of "neutral" don't you understand?

If I take your account at face value (not being familiar with the incident; would perhaps be nice of you to provide a link, but I know that's asking a lot around here), then here would be some neutral facts:

- The Taliban did (something), killing a 7-year-old boy- The Taliban say the boy was spying and that they punished him- Critics of the Taliban say that the punishment was unjust and constitutes an act of murder

Perhaps there are some other facts, such as evidence supporting or refuting each side's claims. Perhaps there aren't. But frankly, if that's your example of a "hard" problem for being neutral, then I'd have to conclude there's no problem and you just don't know what neutral sounds like.

When a group and/or point of view is so irrefutably evil, report the facts as they are and everyone observing the facts will see that they are evil. If you instead take the road you're advocating, and insist that all anyone get to see about them is your emotional reaction, then you're insisting that everyone else "take your word for it" that they are evil. That will only breed sympathy for them.

There is a difference between neutral reporting and neutral action. Civilization depends on seeing that distinc

Punished him, where the correct punishment for his act in their eyes was death?

We punish people with a death sentence in the US, we're far from the only ones. That some are quicker to carry out that sentence and/or looser to apply it does not make it cease to be a punishment in the eyes of those conducting the deed.

As a historian once told me, a statement of pure facts would render everything meaningless. It would reduce history to mere chronicle. It's all "what" and no "why." Nothing can have an effect, things just follow one another in a rote manner with no real connection of cause.

As a historian once told me, a statement of pure facts would render everything meaningless. It would reduce history to mere chronicle. It's all "what" and no "why." Nothing can have an effect, things just follow one another in a rote manner with no real connection of cause.

It is possible to state opinions as facts in this context, if you can cite them from an outside source. E.g. "So-and-so said this[#], while Other-party disputed it thusly[#]"

So you could remain neutral without deciding whose statements are credible, and you'd still get your "why".

I'm sorry, but really. I don't argue that the question "why?" shouldn't be asked, but it is not an appropriate question to ask until you "what". Speculating about "why" without knowing for sure you've got the "what" right is beyond meaningless.

One solution would be to allow both sides to be expressed. Abortion is a good topic:

If the abortion entry has a section regarding pro-abortion, and another section regarding anti-abortion, each written by people that hold those views, that would be neutral. To me, neutral doesn't mean there aren't sides taken...it just means both sides have to have equal representation.

I think this idea that there are two-sides to everything is actually a significant problem in politics, and especially in media. "Balanced" should not mean getting a frothing-at-the-mouth liberal shouting at a born-again-conservative... it should mean getting some people who can see multiple sides of an issue and trying to be honest about the relative merits of both sides.

Let's use your example of abortion. Setting someone who is "pro-choice" against someone who is "pro-life" does not really capture the issue very well - only the extreme edges. I'd wager that most people would lie somewhere in the middle... most people would probably not object to abortion when the fetus is deformed or the mother's life is at stake, or in the case of rape. On the other hand, most rational people seemed to find partial birth abortions pretty horrifying, and I don't seem to have much trouble finding people who dislike abortion as a form of birth control.

On the contrary, I for example find C-SPAN's morning call-in show as the epitome of "balance." They take a call from one raving whacko from the left, let him speak for 30 seconds, until he sounds like an idiot, and then abruptly cut him off in the middle, and then do the same thing for the whacko on the right.

It's a splendiforous counterexample to what you see everywhere else. The only time I cringe is when it's obviously someone in a nursing home (who else is going to wait on hold for hours at 6 in the m

I guess there's balance, and then there's balance. Your definition uses positions from the two extremes. Another would use positions as close to each other as possible. Still another (and the one I'd favor) would use the two "positions" that were most representative of all parties on their respective sides. Tough to quantify, perhaps, but it keeps out the fanatics at each end as well as the useless wishy-washy Arlen Specters that surround the middle.

The difference in the two concepts of balance is in yours, someone or some group is deemed to be "right" or "desirable" and that point of view is elevated at the expense of others. In your estimation, the "wise middle" is that view - but from another point of view, your wise middle is the same as somebody else's extreme. They're both defined by certain groups of people getting together and positing a worldview at the expense of others.

The other kind of balance is the one to just let it all hang out. I li

Wikipedia's neutrality policy and its style isn't really just to have two sides on a matter write a paragraph of propaganda and hope it balances out. It's to write an article whose accuracy is impeccably true by discussing the opponents and proponents in the controversy in a factual way. ("Planned Parenthood says this. The Catholic Church says that. Criticisms of the Catholic Church's position include X, Y, and Z, from organization J, K, and Q; for more information see the sub-article on this particular controversy so we don't detain the main article any further.") No one ever doubted that the one is a supporter and the other a detractor.

To take a page from Indiana Jones, it's about facts, not truth. If it's truth you're after, go study philosophy.

Wikipedia's neutrality policy and its style isn't really just to have two sides on a matter write a paragraph of propaganda and hope it balances out. It's to write an article whose accuracy is impeccably true by discussing the opponents and proponents in the controversy in a factual way.

If you want the two sides thing, go to Everything2, which is generally happy not to delete any article that isn't too rude and doesn't seem to be total bullshit. Some topics (titles, really) are locked and you can't add anything to them.

It's to write an article whose accuracy is impeccably true by discussing the opponents and proponents in the controversy in a factual way.

Unfortunately, this principle breaks down outside of the scientific community when it comes to topics in one of two areas:

a) emotionally, especially religious, matters, because people who seriously believe that their eternal happiness or damnation depends on it regularily pull out all the stops when it comes to convincing others. The seemingly simple act of just identifying the facts is suddenly very difficult and faces opposition. And since WP doesn't allow original research, and religious nutjobs have no

If the abortion entry has a section regarding pro-abortion, and another section regarding anti-abortion, each written by people that hold those views, that would be neutral.

encyclopedia [en-sahy-kluh-pee-dee-uh] - noun1. a book or set of books containing articles on various topics, usually in alphabetical arrangement, covering all branches of knowledge or, less commonly, all aspects of one subject, composed of a pair of propaganda pieces for each topic.

If there are too many mainstream views on the topic to give each a column, then you pick an arbitrary choice -- either random order on page load, alphabetical, chronological by earliest reference, or something else at random.

Fringe views get listed after the mainstream ones with a similar layout structure.

Yeah, but they aren't "open and clear" they change depending on the editor and which page.

There are certainly problem page editors, just as there are problem individual contributors. This is an inherent problem, and it seems to be one that Wikipedia is constantly experimenting/struggling with. I cut them some slack, since no one has ever done anything like this before. Certainly I think that calling them "hypocritical" is a bit overboard.

There are a -lot- of problem page editors on the weirdest articles. If you are an anonymous contributor, chances are that your edits will be reverted without someone even looking at them. Heck, even citations are reverted because they "look suspicious". I used to contribute some to Wikipedia whenever I saw an error, however, there has been too many times that my edits have been reverted without anyone looking at them or reading them. Even simple things like correcting spelling mistakes all too often get rev

Which they patently aren't. The whole idea of a wiki is that people contribute what they know, and others enhance it. It's how wikipedia grew from a few small articles to a wealth of information in many languages. Yet they now have bots going around and automatically deleting anything that the nothing-better-to-do, always-there gatekeeper-zealots decide is (currently) too short or isn't (yet) worded in a uniform way.

The "hypocrites" are the ones who complain about the problems of a community-edited site while actively contributing to the problem so they can complain more. Of course a community site isn't going to work if a significant portion of its members are actively subverting it. Banning repeat offenders isn't such a bad idea.